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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

How does McDonald’s sample budget for employees reflect consumer ideology?

By Marc Jampole

McDonald’s created a sample budget for its employees
to help them do better financial planning.The budget is so absurd in its assumptions and serves as such ready
proof that Mickey Dee’s doesn’t pay its workers enough that you would almost
swear it was satire—something Jonathan Swift might conjure. Other articles have pointed out the almost mocking lack of
reality in a budget that starts off by depending on a second job that pays 85%
of what you’re getting for flipping burgers for 40 hours a week—that is, if
you’re lucky enough to have a full-time job at Mickey Dee’s.

What I find interesting is the degree to which the McDonald’s
sample budget for employees reflects the ideology of consumerism.

We start with the fact that the second most expensive line
item is the car payment. Note that McDonald’s is not talking about what one of
its full-time employees might spend on operating the car each month—insurance,
gas, maintenance. No, this line item of $150 is for paying the loan you took to
buy your car. Not only does McDonald’s assumes that everyone has a car, but it
also assumes that you borrow money to buy it, as opposed to running your car
into the ground. These are two of the major tenets of American consumerism: 1)
drive a car and 2) borrow to get what you want before you can afford it.

The budget offers the possibility that the monthly housing
payment is a mortgage. Where can you get a house with a $600 mortgage (which
must also include real estate taxes)? McDonald’s knows that very few of its
employees can afford a mortgage, but the possibility of being able to have a
house sets a goal for the employee: home ownership, which is another tenant of
American consumerism.

Note that the budget assumes that the employee will be
completely middle class: have health insurance, cable TV service and a car. Of
course the numbers they put down are phony: What health insurance plan is a
mere $20 a month? How many people pay nothing for heating? The $600 a month for rent or a mortgage
payment must have seemed quaint to McDonald’s employees in San Francisco and
New York.

But this low-balling of virtually every line item enables
McDonald’s to give people the magnificent sum of $800 a month for the line item
in bold: Monthly Spending Money.
That’s $800, or $27 per day, that the employee can spend every month on him or
herself. It’s called disposable income and it’s the lifeblood of consumer
culture. Movies, clothes, vacations, gambling, jewelry, HBO, restaurants—all is
possible with the $800 a month, at least on a small scale.

Except for three things:

That $800 has to cover food.

It also has to cover car maintenance and
gasoline

It also has to cover the difference between the
low-ball estimates of the other line items and what they will really cost.

Nowhere does the budget let us know that Monthly Spending
Money includes food, gas and car maintenance. Let’s hope that the employees who
use this budget don’t buy season’s tickets to the Lakers before they figure out
that they also have to pay for food with that $800 a month of spending money
they get.

By constructing a budget that assumes a typical employee
could live a consumer-driven life, McDonald’s not only asserts the consumer
ideology, it also attempts to hide the fact that their jobs make it impossible
for employees to live the American dream reflected in the budget. McDonalds has fooled no one, though, as
witnessed by the excoriation it has gotten from the mainstream news media.

The McDonald’s sample budget for its employees is new
evidence that we need to raise the minimum wage and not marginally, but by a
lot. After the initial jolt to the economy, a minimum wage of $15 an hour would
drive up all wages and lead to more consumer spending. It would give the McDonald’s workers twice as
much money each month, which means they might not have to work a second job, or
if they did, they could have some real spending money. Of course that would
mean that McDonald’s executives and shareholders would have less money to plow
into the stock market or expensive art.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.